No More Reprieves For Jail

September 19, 1985|By New York Times News Service.

CINCINNATI — The main cell block at one of the older urban jails in the country has closed after more than a decade of courtroom battles.

In 1976 a judge found conditions at the Community Correctional Institution`s five-story Civil War-era block to be inhumane. The 550 cells, which have no plumbing or lighting, were ordered closed by 1978.

But legal delays, defeat of a bond issue for a new jail and transfer of ownership of the jail in 1981 from the city to Hamilton County delayed until last week the transfer of most of the prisoners to a new complex.

Inmates, grand juries, federal and state judges and public officials all agreed that the old jail is unsanitary, unsafe and unconstitutional.

``There is no doubt that it was cruel and unusual punishment to confine anybody in that institution,`` said Judge Gilbert Bettman, who ordered the jail shut. ``But nobody wants to spend the money on jails. Prisons are always last in line for the tax dollar.``

The jail was built as a workhouse in 1866 and opened in 1869 as a model jail. Cells, which had no ventilation, measured 8 feet by 6 feet. Each inmate was given a plastic pail to use as a toilet, and the prisoner`s first task each morning was to empty it into a sink on the floor.

Those convicted of misdemeanors were frequently housed with felons. Reading was difficult by day and impossible at night. Rats, mice and roaches proliferated. Prisoners reported seeing rats swim up through sinks. In winter the building was cold, and in summer it was an inferno.

``It was bad in there, real bad,`` said a former inmate, Ricky Lamont Drain, 21, who spent three days there this summer.

``You had to see it to believe it,`` said Michael O`Hara, a Legal Aid Society lawyer. ``We`re talking about decades of scum, dust and body oils that clung like moss to the cell areas. I don`t think the community ever realized what a sentence to (the jail) meant.``

Closing of the jail was postponed in 1978 because city officials hadn`t acted to find an alternative site.

Bettman, the senior judge of Hamilton County Common Pleas Court, said his main concern in 1976 was a fear that a fire might kill hundreds of people, because each cell had to be unlocked individually. His ruling, which also called for massive improvements in the jail in the two years before its closure, came in a lawsuit filed in 1972 by the Legal Aid Society.

After the bond issue was defeated, the city thrust the burden of housing prisoners onto the county by ordering city police to arrest prisoners under state statutes only.

The county was forced to seek a delay in the closing, said Robert Newman, a former Legal Aid lawyer.

City Manager William Donaldson and other city officials were found in contempt of court, but no sentence was issued by a judge who inherited the case.

Judge Harry Klusmeier ordered the county to build a new jail. In the four years it took to build the facility, conditions worsened at the old one, according to Legal Aid attorneys, and the inmate population swelled to more than 900 from 450.

``It was the most primitive jail I have ever seen,`` Robert Powitz, a prison expert from Wayne State University in Detroit who has toured more than 30 facilities in 10 states, said at a hearing in July on closing the cell block.

A renovated minimum-security wing is to stay open for at least two years. The city has not announced its plans for the jail after the county leaves the building in 1987.